I’ve gotten a new phone and setting it up for the past few days - a Fairphone 5 with Android installed. So obviously, this means I can’t escape Googles clutches. Sure, whatever.

I have been VERY adamant about pressing “No” on all prompts, that try to get me to try something out or use some dumb service. I do not want any AI tool or similar to go through my files.

Yet, while perousing the depths of my system settings, I realized Google Photos was using a suspicous amount of storage. Somehow, it had “synchronized” ALL my locally saved pictures - this included pictures of my vacations, my drivers license, private pictures I would have rather not shared, and so on…

And while checking the Google Photos App for the damage done, obviously it had already automatically generated “previews” and “albums” for me, neatly organized.

IT HAD AUTOMATICALLY ANALYSED MY DRIVERS LICENSE AND SAVED IT INTO AN ALBUM CALLED “Identity-related”

How the fuck is this legal? I am so mad at myself right now. I’m usually so fuckin cautious about denying any sort of pop-up and setting all settings as strictly as possible.

So obviously I just had to spent 2 hours figuring out how to turn this “synchronization” off, and how to delete all photos in google photos - spoiler alert: There is no “Delete All” button. You have to manually select every single fucking image.

Sorry for the rant, I hope it’s not too off-topic. I’m just so mad right now.

  • RealM__@lemmy.worldOP
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    7 hours ago

    There’s no article - this is something that happened to me personally, today. I needed an outlet and wanted some advice what to do about this, and I’m really happy about the responses I’ve gotten.

    • quick_snail@feddit.nl
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      7 hours ago

      Yes, but you’re just screaming into an ephemeral void.

      You could actually make google pay for this if you wrote an article about this on substack and then linked to it here.

      Google has already paid over a billion dollars for GDPR violations. They do change their behavior as a result of such reporting and legal consequences.

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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        6 hours ago

        Op should deff fight back but let’s temper the expectations here… Realistically nothing will happen.

        But yes it should be documented

        • quick_snail@feddit.nl
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          1 hour ago

          Google specially has been fined over a billion dollars. GDPR law suits and financial consequences are very realistic